Ali Hurson - Advances in Computers (Volume 130)

Traditionally, Advances in Computers, the oldest series to chronicle the rapid evolution of computing, annually publishes several volumes, each one typically comprising four to eight chapters, describing the latest developments in the theory and applications of computing.

The 130th volume is an eclectic one that has been inspired by the recent interest in research and development in computer science and computer engineering. This volume is a collection of five chapters as follows:

In response to an increasing number of app downloads on mobile devices, Alhaddad et al. report and articulate their experiences of developing a black box, model-based testing approach to test mobile apps. , FSMApp: Testing mobile apps, introduces the FSMApp approach and compares it with the black box MBT approach. Several case studies are presented to explore the applicability, scalability, effectiveness, and efficiency of FSMApp.

An overview of an autonomous vehicle's communication ecosystem within the framework of an intelligent transportation system is the major theme of entitled Wheel tracks, rutting a new Oregon Trail: A survey of autonomous vehicle cybersecurity and survivability analysis research. In the chapter, King et al. address the importance of cybersecurity in the development of autonomous vehicles. Vulnerabilities involving existing vehicular technology and connectivity among vehicles at varying levels of autonomy are discussed and recognized as key issues in the survivability of autonomous vehicles under cybersecurity attack. The chapter surveys the research landscape of autonomous vehicles, focusing on security and survivability; related attributes such as performability are also addressed. Research areas are visualized in a taxonomy, and gaps are discussed throughout the chapter. Finally, recommendations and future research opportunities are articulated.

entitled ClPyZ: A testbed for cloudlet federation by Nayyar et al. describe the challenges of finding a suitable instrument and environment to conduct and validate research. The chapter presents ClPyZ, a visualization platform of cloudlet computing, which is a variant of mobile edge computing that aims to provide computational facility to users to enhance the quality of services and the quality of experience for resource-constrained mobile devices. In addition, it explores the concept of federation resource sharing and load balancing.

The multicore architecture by Guertin and Hurson is the subject of discussion in . The chapter articulates the importance of a multicore approach in supporting both instruction-level parallelism and thread-level parallelism at a lower clock frequency in comparison to the superscalar approach that offers a higher performance per watt.

However, the advantages of a multicore architecture come at the expense of several challenges such as cache coherency and communication among the cores. The chapter is intended to address these architectural challenges and their potential solutions within the scope of the multicore architecture.

Finally, in entitled Perceptual image hashing using rotation invariant uniform local binary patterns and color feature, Xia et al. focus on the perceptual image hashing technique commonly used in cloud-based multimedia systems for security purposes. A four-step scheme is proposed. Extensive experiments are performed to show the robustness and discrimination capability of the proposed scheme and its superiority over several other existing methods.

I hope that the readers will find this volume interesting and useful for teaching, research, and other professional activities. I welcome feedback on this volume as well as suggestions for topics of future volumes.

Ali R. Hurson, Missouri University of Science and Technology, Rolla, MO, United States

Ahmed Alhaddad; Anneliese Andrews; Zeinab Abdalla Department of Computer Science, University of Denver, Denver, CO, United States